Popular fitness brand CrossFit has deleted its Facebook and Instagram accounts with a combined following of about 6 million, saying the platforms betrayed users’ trust after they removed a popular nutrition-oriented user group.
“Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease,” CrossFit said in a statement posted on Wednesday, referring to the Banting7DayMealPlan group that Facebook mysteriously deleted – only to reinstate it without an explanation. The group’s 1.65 million users shared their experiences and information about low-carb high-fat diets.
Highlighting CrossFit’s “tireless defense of its community against overreaching governments, malicious competitors, and corrupt academic organizations,” the brand explained it feels obligated to remove itself from a platform that has “betrayed” its “responsibility and assurance of good faith, transparency and due process” to its users while it investigates both the reasons Banting7DayMealPlan was deleted and “other well-known public complaints” about Facebook.
A litany of the social media platform’s crimes followed, from censorship and enabling disinformation campaigns to feeding user data to state, federal, and international authorities, advertisers and intelligence agencies. CrossFit also mentions the massive security breaches, intellectual property theft, and “utopian socialist” behavior modification.
The manifesto, posted earlier this week, has made CrossFit a hero in some unlikely circles – Breitbart, Reason, and Infowars all praised the move.